Originally published in Faithwire
By all accounts, Christian persecution is worsening across the globe. Joel Veldkamp, head of international communications at Christian Solidarity International, is among those who know the full extent of the issue, often observing its evils firsthand.
And these diabolical infractions — from killings to land seizure to discrimination — have a rooting, Veldkamp believes, in the overarching spiritual battle between good and evil.
“I think the way the Bible speaks about how the powers and the principalities operate is very important, because, what drives the powers and the principalities of the air — you might say, the evil spiritual powers of the world — is a desire to unseat God and to be the most powerful, the most important thing in the universe,” he said. “And we see a lot of the temporal powers, so states, governments, terrorist groups, are driven by a similar desire — a desire for supremacy, a desire to remake the world the way they want to see it be remade.”
These individuals and groups will essentially “give themselves over to evil” to achieve their stated goals and aspirations. The result of these tragic quests can often be seen in the deadly persecution observed in various nations across the globe.
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Listen to Veldkamp explain the role of evil in persecution:
Among other examples, Veldkamp cited Nagorno-Karabakh, a small, landlocked region between Armenia and Azerbaijan that had long been steeped in Christian history and was populated by mostly Armenian Christians.
“This is a place where there’s 1 700 years of uninterrupted Christian history,” he said. “This is a place where some of the first translations of the Bible were made into languages outside of Greek. This is a place where just generations and generations of people have carried on the faith, and last year it was destroyed.”
Veldkamp decried “an ethnic cleansing campaign by the dictatorship of Azerbaijan”, which included a siege and military attack that eventually drove out the entire population.
“Again, I think there’s something demonic in that we had a nine-month lead time on this,” Veldkamp said. “Everyone could see it happening. We could see it coming down the pike. We knew how this was going to end. And no one in the world seemed to be able to muster the political will to do anything about it.”
The end result is the exile of these Armenian Christians and a loss of Christian history, with many lives upended in the process. Veldkamp said coping with so much suffering can be difficult.
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